The Last
Of All Suns
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By John C
Wright
1. WE ARE LOST
We are lost in endless and titanic halls of
windowless metal. Some of the things pursuing us
are so large that, to them, even these halls are
cramped, and the miters of the crawling sphinxes
scrape flakes of debris from unseen expanse of
black plate so high above.
I say we are aboard a ship. The other men
resurrected from the Archive disagree. Some think
we are in hell, or in a fairy-mound, or suffering
the hallucinations imposed by the
thinking-machines of futuristic science.
Of all of us, the man from the latest period of
humanity hails from AD 29,000,000; some
twenty-nine million years after my death. He came
from an age long after the sun had died, a
terror-haunted world of eternal darkness. His home
was a titanic fortress called the Last Redoubt, a
structure armored against the infinite cold of a
sunless sky, nursing its life on the last few
embers of dying geothermal and geomagnetic heat.
His name is Ydmos of Utter-Tower. Ydmos thinks
this vessel is a redoubt like his, one long ago
captured by the enemy, and that we are all buried
far underground.
Even his era is uncountable years lost, compare
to this present one. Earth was murdered more than
fifteen billion years ago; the Milky Way, star by
star, was consumed by darkness five billion years
ago, and the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds
as well. The great galaxy in Andromeda, her
satellite galaxies M32 and M110, and Triagulum
Galaxy in M33, are also gone: the spiral galaxies
in Ursa Minor, Sculptor, Draco, Carina, Fornax:
over the slow millennia, all are destroyed and
vanished.
All the stars known to the astronomers of history
are gone: the galaxies have tumbled together into
a vast and central fire, the Last Of All Suns. At
the core of this sun is one infinitely heavy point
of nothingness where nine-tenths of the mass and
energy of the universe are compressed.
Of the remaining tenth part of the substance of
the universe, some lingers yet in the form of
matter, including a remnant of red-dwarf galaxies,
their cores absorbed into black holes, their arms
choked with exhausted nebulae that will never
collapse against to form fresh stars. The dying
galaxies are streaming toward the central fire,
and, from our position in time and space, seem, to
us, not yet to have been consumed. Perhaps that
event has happened: the light from it has not
reached us. Some of the remaining universal mass
is in the form of energy: the residue of the
universe has dropped to a uniform background
radiation just above absolute zero.
And one infinitely small residuum of the dying
cosmos is matter and energy lingering yet in the
form of living creatures and their works: there is
one ship left, with us aboard.
There is something else aboard as well, something
horribly alien to our continuum, to life, to time
and space and order. The ship is theirs: we are as
rats in the hold.
2. THE SHOT
It was dark. A few fitful lanterns, perhaps a
quarter mile up off the deck, perhaps fifteen
billion years old, emitted sickly glints of
greenish-yellow light. The pounding of numberless
claws on the metal deck-plates was like drumming
rain.
The looming creature Ydmos called a Night Hound
came running ahead of a galloping pack of
malformed hobgoblins. This breed of Night Hound is
a hard-skinned albino monster larger than a
dray-horse, with a face like a hairless wolf and
teeth like an alligator.
Ydmos raised his odd-looking weapon: it was a
poleaxe tipped with a sharpened disk. The disk
spun like a buzz saw, and a flare like lightning
came from it, and a low roar like a lion’s roar.
The weapon was dazzling bright in his hands, and
his fluttering shadow pivoted about his
wide-placed feet as he swung. The creature saved
itself from a mortal blow to its thick neck by
raising its forepaw into the blazing path of the
weapon. The stroke chopped through scale and hide
and muscle to part the monster's flesh from wrist
to elbow. A fan of black and stinking blood flew
up from the wound, and the creature screamed even
more loudly than the lightning-roaring weapon.
The Night-Hound reared up on his hindquarters,
one huge fore-limb hanging limply, and slashed
down with its other. Its palm was wide as a
dinner-plate, its nails longer than dirks. Ydmos
fell.
The wheel of lightning shed by the weapon was
quenched, and the little pocket of light
surrounding Ydmos winked out. In sudden gloom and
silence, small noise of his pole-arm clashing to
the deck was audible.
I lifted my trusty Holland & Holland elephant
gun to my shoulder -or the dream thing, whatever
it was, that pretended to be my fine old beauty of
the gunsmith’s craft-and squeezed the trigger. The
trigger had pull; the heft of the weapon was
right. It felt heavy in my hands, trusted and
familiar.
The rifle was solid. I could feel the grain of
the wood against my cheek as I brought it to my
shoulder, I could see the tiny scratches and
irregularities in the polished barrel. The sites
cast a very tiny shadow on the curved surface of
the barrel. It was real. I had faith in it.
I fire a 900-grain slug at nearly four tons of
muzzle-energy. The slug is thicker than my thumb,
and you can knock over a tree with it, at short
ranges. The familiar smell of cordite, cotton
soaked in nitro, rose to my nostrils.
(For a moment, a terrible moment, I was convinced
this was all a dream, and that I would wake up
again in the Veldt, the hot sun throwing a
zebra-striped pattern of shadows from the long
grass against my tent walls, and Lisa outside,
looking pretty in her jodhpurs and pith helmet,
calling me a slow-poke and telling me the game was
getting away. For a moment.)
Fortunately, the matter-wizard
Abraxander-the-Threshold (from Tau Ceti, circa AD
30,000) had also been able to materialize a heavy
jacket with a padded shoulder. Even with this
padding, the kick jarred my shoulder painfully.
Either my imagination had over-charged the shells
with powder, or I was weaker now than I had been
when I was alive.
The Night Hound went down as if felled by a
hammer, half-severed at its horny collarbones, its
chest blown open. I could see ribs, sliding
chest-muscles, pumping lung tissue. Black blood
streamed from its shattered neck and chest, and
flooded across the deck. The stench was terrible.
Even dead, its jaws continued to snap, and its
legs continued to kick, and the barbs in its tail
went in and out like the stringer in a dead wasp
does.
You would think the creatures from hell, or from
outer-space, would be used to loud noises. It
seemed not. All the monsters quailed at the
report, shocked. A terrible silence hung in the
corridor for a long, strange moment. The echoes of
the shot reverberated through the ship, farther
and farther, echo answering echo.
The monsters ran away.
3. THE LAUGHTER
Uj, the shaggy man, gripped the bone he used as a
truncheon in his teeth, dropped to all fours, and
scampered doglike across the deck toward Ydmos,
and his wolfskin pelt flapped on his hairy back as
he ran. If I am right, Uj is a Neanderthal, or
some other pre-human homonid, the earliest of us,
even as Ydmos was the latest. The method the Blue
Man uses to discover our dates returns no reading
from the Neanderthal, or so he says. (The Blue Man
claims he is measuring of the regular decay of
certain particles in our bodies-but how can these
be our original bodies?) Uj may be from the
future, after an age of degeneration, rather than
from the past.
"It is too late!" I called, "Leave him!"
But I was wrong. The Neanderthal saw or sensed
something I did not. The fingers of the gauntlet
of Ydmos flexed slightly. His pole-arm was laying
a foot or so to his right, its heavy disk-shaped
ax-blade dark, not spinning. But when his hand
trembled, the weapon slid across the deck, as if
pulled by an invisible thread, into his grasp, and
the blade lit up with terrible energy again.
Even as the main body of the monsters fled from
us, there came a sound like a laugh both very near
at hand, and from very many miles away, perhaps on
another deck. It was one sound, coming from two
different points in space. It was a large laugh,
larger than an elephant’s lungs could have made.
It was as if a hillside laughed, or a world, and
we felt it in our bones.
The light from the weapon of Ydmos was snuffed
out. Perhaps Ydmos had merely doused his weapon as
a precaution, when The Thing That Laughs uttered
its hideous noise: but at that moment, it looked
more to me as if that laugh had blown it like a
candle.
That laugh made us flee in panic, despite our
temporary victory. We ran from the monsters who
were running from us, both sides fleeing the
other. This is more common in irregular skirmishes
than you might imagine: officers rarely report it
when it happens, for no one can explain, later,
why you run from someone who you’ve routed. Panic
happens in war.
Ahead of us was a place where a lantern had
fallen, making a 100-yard wide crater in the
deckplates. Even panicked, we were wise enough to
give the thing wide berth as we circled the
crater: radiations leaking from the damaged glass
were deadly. But the light was brighter here
because of it, giving us a glimpse of what lay
ahead: before us, we saw the whole tremendous
width of the corridor was filled with an
encroaching black mist, and the lanterns overhead
were winking out, one by one. In the depth of the
mist could be glimpsed pale and quivering mounds
of flesh, the bodies of enormous slugs, large as
freight-trains, crawling blindly toward us, quite
without noise.
To my left, I saw a wide hatch swing quietly
open. This section of bulkhead was between two
buttresses, half-hidden in the dim light. I saw,
through the open hatch, a set of metal stairs,
going down and down.
The Neanderthal pointed toward the valve with his
bone truncheon, beckoning us, and he gave a soft
hoot. He did not wait to see if we followed, but,
with Ydmos still across his back, the shaggy man
was away, scooting on all fours down the stairs.
I hissed softly, afraid to raise my voice, but Uj
did not answer. Gloom swallowed him.
Two more of our small band, Mneseus, the
sorcerer-king from Atlantis, and Enoch the
antediluvian, both sprinted toward the stairs. A
third, the Blue Man, who was calling himself
Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss today, never does
anything in a hurry, and so he strolled in a
leisurely saunter after them. The Cave-Man or
Redskin or whatever he was named He-Sings-Death,
came and stood near me, his spear in its
spear-thrower held lightly at his shoulder, his
eyes turned intently toward the approaching wall
of mist, the silent masses of blind slug-flesh. He
bounced on his toes in an agony of impatience: he
obviously wanted to flee down the stair, and
escape this wide expanse of open corridor, but did
not want to abandon gray-haired Abraxander, the
fifth of our group, or me.
I mistrusted the stairs: I felt we were being
herded. But in a small company of eight men,
leaderless, whoever is the most rash will lead,
and the rest must follow or allow the company to
be scattered.
I trudged down the stairs into the gloom, rifle
ready, Abraxander-the-Threshold on slippered feet,
coming in a silken rustle of robes behind me.
He-Sings-Death, silent as a cat, came after,
watching backwards for signs of pursuit, his
spear-hand at his shoulder, elbow high, tense and
ready to cast.
We all flinched when the valve came quietly shut
behind us, cutting off the lamplight from the
corridor.
© John
C Wright 1 Nov 2003
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